Pablo Picasso: A Guide to Picasso’s Life and Paintings

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881–1973) was a Spanish artist known for his paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Art historians credit him as one of the founding fathers of cubism, an avant-garde art movement in which artworks involved geometric abstracted forms. Along with Georges Braque, Picasso helped develop the art of collage, which involves pasting together many images—usually clipped from books or magazines—to make a single image.

Picasso is also known for pioneering the art of assemblage. Similar to collage, assemblage is an art form in which the artist constructs a three-dimensional artwork using mostly found items. Picasso found inspiration from Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, post-Impressionist painter Henri Matisse, and Baroque painter Rembrandt.

Pablo Picasso has one of the largest bodies of work of any artist. With more than 20,000 artworks, his journey as an artist is one of the most accessible in art history.

• Early years: Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, in 1881. His father, Don Jose Ruiz y Blasco, was a painter and art professor. Recognizing Picasso's talent at an early age, his father gave him formal training in the arts. At the age of 13, Picasso enrolled in an advanced class at Barcelona's School of Fine Arts. Three years later, he was admitted to Madrid's leading art school, the Royal Academy of San Fernando. During this time, he frequented Madrid's Prado Museum and admired works by painters like El Greco and Francisco Goya.
• Blue period: In 1900, Picasso traveled to Paris for the first time. This would be the beginning of a period marked by extreme poverty and depression. These became the predominant themes in his works from 1901 to 1904. Painting almost exclusively with blue and green, Picasso painted grim scenes featuring prostitutes and beggars. He painted The Old Guitarist and La Vie—both somber, dark pieces—at the height of this period in 1903.
• Rose period: From 1904 to 1906, Picasso's work took a new direction. The artist began to paint with many reds, browns, oranges, and yellows. Much of his work from this period depicts acrobats and harlequins. Similar to clowns, harlequins were comedic circus jesters who wore bold, checkered costumes. This work caught the eye of American novelist and art collector Gertrude Stein, and she became his champion patron. Picasso painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein in 1905.
• African period: From 1907 to 1909, African artworks influenced Picasso's work—specifically the stylized representation of the human form found in African sculpture. One of his most famous works from this time was Head of a Woman (Fernande), a sculpture and portrait of his companion Fernande Olivier that he completed in 1909.
• Cubism: Picasso, along with his colleague Georges Braque, began to create artworks in neutral tones that explored the deconstruction of objects for the purpose of analyzing their various shapes. This exploration led them to what's known as synthetic cubism, in which the found scraps of paper are added into paintings; the result is artwork that looks fragmented and disjointed.
• Neoclassicism and surrealism: In the aftermath of World War I, Picasso made his first trip to Italy. As was popular at that time, Picasso's work regained a sense of order as he began painting in a neoclassical style, a style that drew heavy inspiration from classical antiquity. It wasn't long before this foray into neoclassicism evolved into surrealism. Surrealism is an art movement that seeks to depict images from within one's unconscious mind. This was revolutionary for Picasso, and he created many famous works in the surrealist style.
• Later years: Picasso never stopped innovating and delving into new mediums. He made sculptures, copperplate etchings, and even appeared in films. He created works tirelessly until he died of heart failure in 1973 in Mougins, France.

Cubism can be broken down into two distinct phases: analytical and synthetic.

• Analytical Cubism (1908–1912): In the early days of experimenting with cubist painting, Picasso and Georges Braque carefully dissected their subjects, analyzing their various angles and shapes and breaking them down into interlocking planes. Picasso painted his works during this period in muted black and grey tones. Girl with Mandolin is one such example of a muted, analytic cubist portrait he created during this time.
• Synthetic Cubism (1912–1914): As cubism continued to develop, artists began to soften their works, employing gentler angles, simpler shapes, and brighter colors. This phase of cubism also gave birth to collage. Picasso's first collage, Still Life with Chair Caning, incorporated a photograph of a cane chair into the painting.

Picasso produced countless works of art. These five famous paintings are particularly pivotal to art history:

1. 1. La Vie (1903): This oil painting from Picasso's blue period features a somber array of blues and greens. The image contains a posthumous depiction of Picasso's friend, Carlos Casagemas, who died by suicide. In the painting, a nude woman embraces a gaunt Casagemas, and it appears that the couple is confronting a mother who's holding a child. Picasso was experiencing depression and had found little financial success during this period. In fact, La Vie is painted over top of another painting that had debuted at the Paris International Exhibition in 1900—remnants of which can still be seen in the background. It is part of the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
2. 2. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907): This painting made massive waves in the art world upon its debut. The work depicts five nude women—two of whom have African masks for faces—drawn in the abstract. It was an early experimentation in cubism and is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
3. 3. Girl Before a Mirror (1932): This painting depicts Picasso's mistress and muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, gazing at her reflection in the mirror. The painting contains multiple perspectives from within the single image. The character is painted from the side, while her reflection directly faces the viewer. In addition, she is painted in different colors with patterns on either side of her body. It is part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
4. 4. Guernica (1937): At over 11 feet tall and 25 feet wide, this oil on canvas painting was one of Picasso’s largest pieces. It depicts people and animals devastated by violence. Picasso made the painting in response to the Nazi bombing of Guernica, a town in northern Spain.
5. 5. The Weeping Woman (1937): This painting is a portrait of one of Picasso's companions, Dora Maar. Picasso painted it during a time in which he was reacting to the Spanish Civil War and its style and tone are reminiscent of Guernica. It is currently housed at the Tate Modern in London.

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